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The exhibition consists of 110 works, from Copley's youth to Winslow Homer's age. They were chosen by a committee headed by Boston Art Historian Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., with assistance from the Louvre's chief curator of paintings Pierre Rosenberg. There are some unavoidable absences and a few awkward or campy presences (like John Quidor, the corny illustrator of Washington Irving's tales, or Edward Ashton Goodes, whose excruciating Fishbowl Fantasy, 1867, is crammed with everything that was worst in the taste of Victorian America). Still, it is hard to see how the difficult task of presenting 18th and 19th century American painting to its home audience, as well as to the city of Ingres, Delacroix and Manet, could have been better done. What the French will make of it, of course, is an open question, since the only premodern American artists known in France are Whistler, Eakins and Cassatt.
The show sets out to tell the story of the professional artist in America. Its starting point is not the folk artist but the painter with academic training (or pretensions to it) whose gaze was fixed on largely European role models. These role models had to be theorized about, because they could not be seen. When Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), painter and America's first museum founder, hopefully named his sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle and Rubens, not one work by these exalted names had yet crossed the Atlantic. The fact that 18th century America had few major artists is not news; the surprising thing, given the meagerness of taste and thin access to good art in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, was that it could support even one. That person, of course, was Copley, whose Boy with a Squirrel, sent to London in 1765, caused Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise its young author to get across the Atlantic "before your manner and taste were corrupted or fixed by working in your little way at Boston."
Copley never did master the grand manner as prescribed by Reynolds. His huge, ambitious history painting, Watson and the Shark, 1778, is a beloved American classic thanks to, not in spite of, its earnest potpourri of quotations from Titian, Raphael, the Borghese Gladiator and the Laocoon. But at the level of the portrait he was exact and forceful. The tight, heavy faces, didactic hands and subtly registered expressions of Copley's New Englanders read like indexes of American character, and his painting of Thomas and Sarah Mifflin (1773) is one of the great 18th century images of the enlightened bourgeois.
Lack of teachers to learn from and of great paintings to see: such problems crimped the style of American painters or sent them, like Benjamin West (the Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose.